nw.js

How portable is this, exactly? Previously, node-webkit looked like a great contender for a universally shippable desktop UI system, but it actually falls on several platforms due to invalid presumptions about locally available dynamically linked libraries [1]. It would be great to see an up-front document about portability promises. Is it possible to use other languages to drive the rendering via a linked API? Thrust [2] did a good start on defining an API for using the UI components from multiple languages, but it still relies on TCP sockets -- as far as I can tell, there's no way to make my application load assets from "bundle://" and redirect that to custom handler code while forbidding other network access, and the use of a local TCP socket to communicate between the UI and the main application means there's also major reason to be

Can HTMLRunner be used as the basis of something like node-webkit[1]? What's its strength / weaknesses compared to that? [1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

"Better" will depend on your needs, but things to look at: Chromium Embedded Framework https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/ Atom shell (based on CEF) https://github.com/atom/atom-shell Brackets Shell (also CEF based) https://github.com/adobe/brackets-shell node-webkit https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit TideSDK http://www.tidesdk.org/

I think the Mac App Store is not the problem it used to be anymore: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/issues/936

One of them is node-webkit (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit)

The article discussed Node Webkit [1] but Atom Shell [2], upon which the Atom editor is built, is a similar technology also worth considering. I find this approach to desktop apps quite intriguing, but I wonder if the underlying dependencies (Node.js, Chrome) are a bit risky from the perspective of adopting this platform for a LOB application (as opposed to say a WinForms/WPF approach, the concern about the future of that notwithstanding). [1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit [2] https://github.com/atom/atom-shell

Also from the bower file, the magic that turns it from a web app into a standalone app is node-webkit [1]. This kind of tool is really becoming one of the best options for creating desktop applications, especially considering how powerful the browsers' devtools have become. It's having like a GUI designer and a debugger rolled up into one. [1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

Something like https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit?

There is also node-webkit [1] [1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

You can mitigate some of the perceived speed issues by defaulting to show: false in package.json and manually opening your first window after the full runtime environment loads. More info here: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/issues/1962#issueco...

As smooth and easy to use compared to what? cough lags-and-stops-responsonding-if-you-sneeze-too-hard-on-a-24GB-ram-machine-visual-studio-2013? cough cough spazzes-out-randomly-when-you-type-characters-xcode? cough sublime text? (which to be fair, is pretty amazing) It's all relative. I've used plenty of really shit 'native graphics' applications (especially cross platform ones); on the other hand, plenty of stuff in the list (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of-apps-a...) work just great for me. shrug I don't think you can discount the entire run time just one the basis of one app.

yes, that is exactly what it does. It adds your tags inside of square brackets at the end of the file name before the extension. It's built in node-webkit [1] though, so it wouldn't (shouldn't) be too hard to integrate websql, sqlite or some other database [2]. [1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit [2] https://github.com/uggrock/tagspaces